Stones of Aran

by Tim Robinson

  Perhaps all that is so. However, my hard hour on the crags has lasted too long now for reconsiderations. Whatever wrong turnings have brought me to this point, there is only one way out, and it lies westward. Only by reporting these cliff-edge experiences (which I am as likely to find on a petal’s rim as on the lip of the ocean) can I get in step with the world again, and I find that to approach them and then crawl back to safety I must cling onto as much factuality as I can grasp at a time. Perhaps such dizzy penultimates are, strictly speaking, indescribable. But dreams are notoriously untellable (if in reality not more so than reality itself), and yet we succeed in telling our dreams; this is because we all dream, we each fail to describe our dream and therefore recognize the ways in which others fail, and so their failures to describe their dreams direct us unerringly to those dreams in our own experience. And if there is no community of experience to appeal to, it has to be created. The drug addict addicts others to the drug out of a craving to communicate the drug-state; the writer instils into the reader the words induced in the writer by experience. Mad faith that the same words will induce the same experience in others!—so that one can say, “That is what I would say, if it were possible to say it!,” and trust that the other will recognize that unsayable.

  THE VILLAGE OF CONTENTED WOMEN

  As a poem of Máirtin Ó Direáin’s whisperingly reminds us, at Christmastime Aran puts candles in its windows to welcome the Holy Family.

  An eol duit, a Mhuire, Oh Mary do you know

  Cá rachair i mbliana Where to go this year

  Ag iarraidh foscaidh Begging shelter

  Do do Leanbh Naofa, For your Holy Child

  Tráth a bhfuil gach doras When every door

  Dúnta Ina éadán Is slammed in His face

  Ag fuath is uabhar By the hate and pride

  An chine dhaonna? Of humankind?

  Deonaigh glacadh Graciously accept

  Le cuireadh uaimse My invitation

  Go hoileán mara To an isle of the sea

  San Iarthar cianda; In the antique West;

  Beidh coinnle geala Bright candles will shine

  I ngach fuineog lasta In every window

  Is tine mhóna And a fire of turf

  Ar theallach adhainte Will glow on the hearth.

  A candle is added for each day of Christmas, and so on a windy Twelfth Night if we stoop to peer past the candle flame gasping in the drafts of our scullery window, Gort na gCapall, a mile away, looks like the dots of a row of dominoes, a child’s game the vast turbulent blackness takes care to step over as it races towards us across the crags.

  Liam O’Flaherty was born in Gort na gCapall, and in the after-swell of his stormy prose many wild words have been written about the situation of this tiny hamlet, giving one to understand that it is menaced by waves that mount two-hundred-foot-high cliffs. In fact it is a quarter of a mile from the sea, and is wrapped around to the south by a low scarp that gives some shelter from the wind and must have protected it much more effectively when the dwellings were all single-storied and had the blunted ridgelines of thatch. Of the eleven houses all but two comparatively recent ones stand close together on a cliffed terrace above a green hollow of marshy fields, where in winter there is standing water and in summer a three-layered haze of red, lilac and pink formed by ragged robin, lady’s smock and bogbean, flowering at different heights above the damp greensward. All the houses face north. Six are of the two-storied slate-roofed design introduced by the Land Commission in the ’fifties, with plain flat façades, a window on either side of the front door, the straight line of the eaves drawn close above the three upstairs windows, and a chimney topping each of the high end-gable walls. The rest are cottages; we saw the last of their thatched roofs replaced by concrete tiles in the ’seventies. Then there are the huddled old stores and barns and odd empty-windowed wall-corners and bereft gable-ends tucked in here and there, relics of ancestral cabins. A rough continuation of the side-road and a branching boreen link all this present and past habitation into a relaxed neighbourliness. The form of the village is, as it were, the story of the village; only the very newest houses, spilt out onto the crag below it to the north, betray a modern disinterest in old tales.

  Perhaps the mutually unintrusive but companionable spatial relationships of Gort na gCapall gave me fond preconceptions of the community, but my years of visiting there have not proved them delusive. On the other hand, the layout itself of Aran’s more linear “street-villages” suggests the sidelong glance of envy and malicious supposition, and in one of two of them I sense a rural claustrophobia compounded by the anomie of suburbia. The dull stress bears hardest on the women, who either escape early to the mainland, or live out lives even more straitened in spatial terms than do the males. I remember one or two girls who looked as if they had been born to dance, but folded away their silken youth with their wedding-dresses and set themselves like jugs on the shelf of their marriages, becoming matronly overnight in expectation of expectation. Later on, bored by their monosyllabic husbands, they might find consolation in fantasy. Making a sequence of visits in one of these villages after a winter’s absence from the island, M found one young wife in a state of exhilaration. “I suppose you’ve been hearing all about me!” she cried. “No!” said M, and instantly regretted her honesty. “You haven’t?” The woman was disappointed; the thought of the scarlet doings the neighbours might be crediting her with had been warming her through the dull months. Or, if their own lives were irremediably prosaic, they thought that perhaps ours were not. For several years we wintered in London, and I used to return in March to air the house and set the vegetable garden. My preparations and M’s reappearance a month or two later were always noticed, in this island so grateful for assurance that the winter was over, and in fact she often coincided with the first bright weather, or came flushed with triumph over the last of the storms or fogs that might have delayed her. Adding to her bridal glow in my eyes were the stylish garments she came in, Courrège, Laura Ashley, Kenso, each in their turn and only a season or two past their peak of fashion, rescued from the dowdy piles in Kilburn charity shops. It had not occurred to me that anyone saw all this as anything but a tribute to myself, to the respringing of our love. But after a few years one of M’s street-village Bovarys took her aside and said, “Can I ask you something? Every time you come back from London, we notice that you look great. Tell me—do you have lovers in London?”

  Some women, though, were gone beyond the mild stimulant of vicarious romance. Worn down by a coercive biology, their skirts hemmed by ever-more clutching hands and mouths and eyes, they had fallen into embittered exhaustion. In our earlier years in Aran, the District Nurse, a nun, was instructing wives in the Billings Method, a way of charting their ovulatory cycles by inspection of vaginal secretions. Approved by the Church as a means of determining the right time to conceive, the method also could not help but indicate the right time not to conceive, and, it being better to fudge than to burn, use of this knowledge was acceptable too. However as a method of birth control it was not the best; among the factors it took no account of were the ache of moonlight, and a husband’s indifference to “safety” after a few pints in the pub. As the first crop of “Billings Babies” ripened, one victim of these delusive haruspications said to me, “The Nun is the only one it seems to work for!” A few years later, two children later, that same woman’s despair had taken on an edge of viciousness. It was at the time of the vet’s annual visit to castrate the bull-calfs; “That’s all there is for it,” she said, “the men will have to go to the vet.” Eventually the Nun retired gratefully to her cloisters, weary of the conflict between her own good sense and the eternal verities.

  Could all those children get their sufficiency of love, I wondered? Some of them had the dark petals of sadness under their eyes. And even if love is as shareable as loaves and fishes, time is not, speech is not. The imaginations of some of these children were word-starved. I once took a six-year-old for a stroll
from his house, down a boreen, across a field, up another boreen. As we reached home I said “Let’s tell them we’ve been to Dublin!” but he struck me down with “That’s all lies!” It was also part of the “natural” way of things that the woman of the house would have sole care of the elderly and infirm. The string of children might therefore be competing for attention with a bed-ridden ancient, such as the grandfather-in-law I heard one exasperated mother complaining of: “If he was younger he’d have died long ago, but him!”—laughing in bitter recognition of the old fellow’s staying-power. While many women seemed to win through to serene grandmotherhood after all those years in which their own identities could only appeal for consideration through their varicose veins, angina or depression, others did not, and I saw them carrying their lives like heavy sacks.

  But it was not like that in Gort na gCapall (though of course my knowledge is limited, and perhaps my memory is selective, tending to group similars together, to organize my book). In that magic round of nests, children however numerous were bright with love, aged grandmothers smiled by the hearth, husbands were welcomed home from the pub even when they were, as one wife expressed it, “a little hilarious.” Once, walking home from a funeral, I fell in with a cosy widow from this contented village, and we chatted about the departed. “It must be hard, going,” she said; “Why can’t we just live in Aran for ever!” For herself, I knew, she would have specified Gort na gCapall, as being neither west nor east nor south nor north of somewhere better, and well located even in regard to Paradise.

  My approach to Gort na gCapall from the Residence was most often goatwise: I would lever myself over the back garden wall, hop across a corner of the great crag to the ragged edge of cliffs marking the saints’ boundary, clamber along it stepping around the ends of walls that stopped on the brink, squeeze down a little crevasse where the cliffs loop around the marshy pocket below the village, browse there on its beautifully indiscriminable subspecies of Irish marsh orchids, and pop up the scarp again by steps trodden into it by long-ago water-fetchers, directly into the heart of the village. If M was with me we would take a less acrobatic but equally picturesque route (it was linguistically picturesque too), down the main road a little and then south by a narrow róidín between the houses of Creig na Córach that leads to a favourite spring at the foot of the cliff-line, Tobar an Bhuaile Bhródúil, the well of the proud milking pasture (proud, pleased, or something in between, as in the phrase chomh bródúil le cat a bhfuil póca air, as proud as a cat with a pocket); thence by stiles and grassy zigzag ways through a child’s paradise (in spring) of buttercups and lambs and rabbits, called An Chrangaire, crangaire being old-Aran for cnagaire, a sixteen-acre holding; finally joining the Gort na gCapall road where it begins its gentle climb by Aill an Tine Chnáimh, the cliff of the bone-fire (the Irish preserves the etymology lost in English), site of the village bonfire on midsummer’s eve. Or if M was dressed for (a favourite word of hers) bothántaíocht, going from bothán (cottage) to bothán for gossip and amusement, we would avoid the prickly vegetation one had to push through in the róidín by taking our bicycles, purring down the mainroad to the T-junction and pedalling along the quiet side-road between green pastures, riding tall between the low walls, regally regarding the ruminants.

  On weekday afternoons Gort na gCapall gave the impression of being discreetly at home to itself. With the children at school and the menfolk on the sea, in the fields or pony-trapping tourists to and from Dún Aonghasa, the women would have the place to themselves. Dogs drowsed on the garden walls, hens scratched under the veronica bushes. Turning left, the road passes Bridgie Fitzpatrick’s and Maggie Conneely’s, and then, increasingly stony and grassy, becomes Bóthar na gCrag. Bridgie, her capacious motherly face, her alert, amused, eyes, became my reference-point when I was first mapping that quarter; she stayed me with sandwiches, and, readier with the pen than her menfolk, noted down place-names for me from their talk:

  Near Port Bhéal an Dúin there is Poll Uí Aodáin can’t say if this spelling is correct, its a great cliff for fishing & young fellows go down there to the shore by rope, not a very safe way but they do it. I hope this little helps you in your good work, it is something well worth doing for the Island.

  Maggie I used to meet when collecting fishing-history from her husband Gregory, who having lost a leg and a trawler in his early days had come back from that disaster to become the father of the contemporary fleet. I remember how her two daughters throughout their early teens seemed to reflect between them a single handsome and cryptic look intercepted from their mother, as if their faces were hand-glasses held up to each other.

  Turning the other way at the entrance to the village, Maeve’s was on the right. A sensible Dublin woman with a good job in Guinness’s, she had fallen in love with the island, married a lively young farmer, had her family quite quickly, inherited a sweet-natured fireside granny for them, and now combined capable domesticity with part-time secretarial work for the little factory in Eoghanacht. Beyond her house was Winnie’s cottage; it was Winnie who would have chosen to live on in Aran for ever. Her husband had been drowned long ago, but then she shared in the winning of the sweepstake with a lady in Cill Mhuirbhigh; she remembers the money being brought in and piled on the table, and the village children calling to lay their hands on the pile for luck. A quietly smiling figure in Winnie’s background when I called (to map her potato-plot for a planning application for a septic tank, and to drink a glass of whiskey in return) was her sister, who apart from going to Mass lived a retired and sheltered life. Finally the boreen, bordered with mauve-blossomed common mallows and tall yellow mulleins, turns up west between Winnie’s cottage and another I didn’t know so well, and ambles off towards the storm-beach and the rock-torn maelstrom behind it, as if the sea were just a crotchety old neighbour who should be called in on now and again.

  The feminine world of Gort na gCapall was not, however, totally open to me, a man. If I nodded into a kitchen here on my way home from the cliff-tops, the ladies would make a hospitable but unexcited move to the kettle. But if M appeared in the doorway behind me, all eyes would light up, arms would be flung open, sweeping me aside as of no consequence. Then if any relict village male was hunkered down by the range in the hope of a cup of tea he would get up wordlessly, sidle out of the back door, and cover his superfluousness by picking through a heap of old nets in an outhouse. I might soon join him there to talk of fishing, potatoes and history, while M would be examining Aran sweaters, and learning new stitches, and nosing out the secret history of the craft—which, it turns out, is not what it is supposed to be.

  As the world has read in a thousand glossy magazines, each family in Aran has its own repertoire of stitches passed down from mother to daughter since time immemorial, rich in Celtic significances and useful in the identification of the corpses of its drowned menfolk; Synge wrote a play on this morbidly intriguing aspect of daily life in the islands. Through the Tree of Life, the Honeycomb, the Carraigín Moss, the Bobailín, the Castle, the Anchor, the Little Fields and Crooked Roads and dozens of other stitches brought by St. Enda from Coptic Egypt, dolorous mother-love and man’s ineluctable fate are entwined into garments of universal sales appeal.

  Understandably, the Aran women who knit sweaters, socks and bobbled caps for sale either from their own houses or through marketing organisations that supply them with the wool, prefer not to disturb the tourists’ belief in this contemporary folklore. To begin unpicking it, one could refresh one’s memory of the Synge play, Riders to the Sea: A fisherman has not returned; a body is washed ashore far away, and a bit of a flannel shirt and a stocking from it are sent to his sisters for identification:

  NORA, who has taken up the stocking and counted the stitches, crying out. It’s Michael, Cathleen, it’s Michael…

  CATHLEEN, taking the stocking. It’s a plain stocking.

  NORA, It’s the second one of the third pair I knitted, and I put up threescore stitches, and I dropped four of th
em.

  In fact stockings were almost the only item knitted on the islands at the period of Synge’s visit, and as he observed himself, the younger men were just beginning to adopt “the usual fisherman’s jersey,” that is, the plain blue jerseys on sale in Galway as in all towns of the Atlantic seaboard. Maeve’s mother-in-law Katie, who was shortly to take to her bed for her latter years, told M that only stockings were knitted in her youth, and that she never knitted a sweater until she married. She vividly remembered the first time she used a cable pattern, having memorized it off the back of a visitor sitting in front of her in the chapel. Bridgie had been taught to knit at school in the late ’twenties by Mrs. Ó hEithir, who had learned from English and American magazines and was the only teacher to teach knitting in the island. The sweaters they knitted had plain bodies and patterned yokes of cables, shadow diamonds and moss stitch, and were died navy or black; Bridget taught her own mother how to make them. The “bawneen” sweaters of unwashed and undyed wool, with narrow panels of various patterns running from hem to shoulder, now synonymous with Aran, were a later development. By the early ’thirties a fashion had evolved in Aran of dressing little boys in white sweaters involving some patterned stitches for their first Communion; visitors drawn to the islands by Robert Flaherty’s presence noticed these, and their demand for adult-sized versions initiated a new employment—one of the many ways in which Flaherty unwittingly intervened in island history. The stitches used were those common to many areas of western Europe (the local word for a sweater being geansaí or gansy, pointing to an influence from Guernsey). Some had probably been introduced by Scottish and Donegal fish-wives brought in by the Congested Districts Board, others arrived in knitting patterns sent home from America by “Yanks,” the Araners’ emigrant relatives. Certain stitches were local inventions—there is one known as Praiseach Pheige Cuaig, Peggy Cooke’s mess, though no one would dare use the name in her hearing (this Peige Cuaig was Máirtín Ó Direáin’s mother and has long gone beyond taking umbrage, which is why I can mention it). Soon a craft of amazing complexity was in rapid evolution; the sweater became a broad field for the display of taste both good and bad. Most of it is done by memory, and it is astonishing to see, as I have, an old lady knitting as she trots down a boreen to the cow. In about 1935 the artist Elizabeth Rivers introduced her friend Muriel Gahan, founder of the famous Country Shop in Dublin and the dedicated champion of Irish crafts, to some of the best knitters, and for the first time Aran knitwear went on sale outside the islands. Soon after that Pádraig Ó Máille’s, the famous old dress shop in Galway, began to sell Aran knits, and Pádraic Ó Síocháin of Galway Bay Products in Dublin began exporting them in large numbers to America, which necessitated regularizing the sizing; before that, as he says “If the Aran knitter had a small husband, you got a short jumper. If she had a long husband, you got a long jumper.” (Ó Síocháin’s book, Aran—Islands of Legend, has done its bit for the propagation of the romantic mythology of Aran knitting.) The cash income was of great importance in those pinched times, and M’s friends could remember exactly what had been bought with their first earnings. In the late ’fifties the typical price paid to a knitter for a garment was £2.10s, the wool being supplied by the dealer, and twenty-five years later it was around £12. Today most Aran sweaters are made in Donegal, and by machine. The professionally designed machine-made products in alpaca and other luxury yarns from the Inishmaan Knitwear Company penetrate the most sought-after markets, and its founder, Tarlach de Blácam, paces the crags with his mind on the lira, the yen, and the politics of Peru. (Fortunately his company also still fosters the hand-knitting tradition of Inis Meáin, which seems to be even richer than that of Árainn.) Perhaps the Aran bawneen reached its apogee in 1985 when one of Jean Paul Gaultier’s male models paraded in tight-knit trousers, sweater and cap in snow-white wool, an outfit that certainly would have identified him had he been washed ashore drowned.